The Button Seller

This story is by A.K. Mountrakis and was part of our 2025 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

Athens, 1954. Coal smoke, cold air, the scrape of a knife wheel drifted down the street. I cut through a stoa I didn’t remember—two buildings leaning on each other like old men.

A fogged window drew my eye. Buttons, Threads, Ephemera was etched faintly on the glass, the kind of store my yiayia would frequent.

I meant to keep walking, but was drawn in by a longing. I edged the door open. A bell rang, thin and late, as if from afar.

Inside, the warm, clean air smelled faintly of spice. Sun came in as though from another world. Shelves climbed to the ceiling, lined with jars of bone, glass, horn, wood, and spools of thread.

A woman stood in the depths, clad in a black dress of an older style. Her eyes reflected a small, steady light of their own.

“You’ve finally come,” she said, nodding. No surprise. Just a statement.

“I don’t…” I began. She must have confused me with a patron. I stayed still.

She picked up a small gleaming object from a box and lifted it toward me. A button: round, heavy, gold, with a little laurel wreath in relief. I hesitated over it.

“My yiayia had…”

“Yes, your grandmother, Fotini,” she said.

“That button… I know it.”

“You should.” She brought the object closer. “It’s everything to do with you.”

With that, I heard, very far off, a sound like water lapping. I knew it couldn’t be, of course.

“How did you know my yiayia?” I finally whispered.

“She was a fine seamstress, wasn’t she? One of my best customers. And a friend.”

My fingers met the gold: cold, then crawling heat. I tried to pull back, but my hand wouldn’t listen. “I don’t want…” I started, but my throat locked. The sound that came wasn’t memory, it was happening now, and I gripped the counter so hard my nails bit wood. The floor didn’t tilt; I was falling upward, or the world was falling away from me.

A harbor rose—ropes, water, a child’s cry in my throat. A woman lifts me. A scarf that smells of tobacco wipes my face; someone says, “Don’t look.”

A voice near my ear: “Wait with her. I’ll be back in an hour.”

Something pressed into a palm — round, hard, bright, the twin of the button under my hand. Not coins, I realized — payment of another kind.

“For your trouble,” the voice said.

“Where do I take her?” another voice asked.

“Anywhere that isn’t with me. I don’t care,” said the familiar voice—cold, already retreating.

A warm hand on my wrist drew me back. I took my hand off the button.

“I don’t… what was… that wasn’t real!” I couldn’t finish sentences. My hands kept moving to my throat, checking for something that wasn’t there. Bile came up fast; I swallowed twice.

“A reminder,” the shopkeeper said. “So you don’t keep bleeding where you can’t see the cut.”

“My mother…” I stopped. The word tasted like metal.

“She wanted a way out. You were a barricade.”

“And my yiayia?”

“She pulled you through the fire,” the shopkeeper said softly. “When the harbor filled with refugees, Fotini carried you and didn’t let go.”

My lungs ached as if I’d run.

“How much?” I asked, touching the button again.

She laughed. “It was paid for a lifetime ago,” she said. “Fotini was my angel as well as yours.”

I kept my palm on the button. In the back of the shop, shadows deepened. If there was a doorway there, it surely led to the unknown.

“You carried me to her, then she saved me,” I said as revelation hit.

“I kept you from being stepped on. Your hands were wet with heat. You made the small sound children make when they’re trying to be brave in a crowd. Keep it,” she said, pressing the button deeper into my palm. “Fotini wouldn’t add to your pain. But you needed to know. That’s why you found the door.”

I didn’t remember choosing a door. I held onto the button anyway. It was heavier than a button should be. I put it in my pocket and turned away from her, still dazed.

The bell rang again as I left, sounding even more distant.

Outside, the stoa breathed cold back at me. Two boys ran past with a hoop and almost knocked me sideways.

My feet knew the way out better than I did. Anger came up, then confusion. The button weighed heavily in my pocket.

A memory surfaced and caught: my mother’s kitchen, lace curtains that never got dirty, a bowl of sugared almonds on the table year-round. We were both younger. The radio spoke over us.

“You’re just like her,” she said. “Head wide open and full of rubbish.”

“Thank God,” I blurted.

“She’ll make you stubborn. I can see it in you already.”

“Yiayia tells the best stories. And she cares!” my younger self kept on.

Mother’s jaw worked. She folded a towel that didn’t need folding. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

“You never do.”

She reached for the bowl and set it in the exact center of the table with two fingers. Mother always liked things to line up.

I walked faster now, letting the old argument keep pace. My mother had tried to trade me for a different life. Yiayia stepped in and made the dangerous crossing with me. The bit of gold in my pocket had been the price offered, then the debt kept. And the shop…

I thought about the stoa where the shop had been and was no more. The wall between the two buildings left no gap. The space itself appeared to have folded shut.

I stood so still I heard the blood in my ears. I put my hand in my pocket and closed it around the button. Still warm.

On the sidewalk a boy shouted the headlines and pushed a paper at a woman who shook her head and kept walking. I watched his mouth and didn’t hear a word. I pressed my thumb into the wreath on the button until it hurt.

I walked again, not to my mother’s flat but past the church, past the grocer, past the cafés where men gesture and argue until closing. I kept my anger company until it thinned enough to see through.

At a corner, where a peddler sold lottery tickets from a pole, I stopped. I took out the button and set it in my hand. I’d almost come undone, the thread between past and present stretched to breaking.

I put the button back in my pocket and turned in place. People flowed by. A tram bell clanged past.

When I finally walked to my mother’s building, I told myself I wasn’t going to knock. I was just looking. But rage came up fast, stupid as fire. My feet kept climbing as if I had no choice.

I stood in the stairwell staring at her door. I was gasping, soundless. The lace curtain moved. She was there, probably wondering why someone was breathing so loud in her hallway. She hears everything she thinks belongs to her.

The rage exploded. I pressed both hands to the wall to stay upright. For a wild second I wanted to kick the door, to scream until the whole building heard what she’d done. Instead I found myself laughing—sharp, broken sounds I couldn’t stop. My mother’s hands, pushing a child toward strangers. Choosing herself. Always choosing herself.

I bit down on my knuckle to stop the laughter. The taste of my own skin brought me back. I tried to steady my hiccupping breath. My throat burned.

I swore then, I would not carry her story for her. I would carry my own. But even thinking it, my hand went to the button in my pocket and squeezed. How heavy was too heavy? How much could I actually carry?

I turned away, thinking to find the shop again by catching it from a different angle. But the stoa where it should have been had lost its depth. I ran my fingers over the plaster and came away chalked.

My yiayia used to say, Some doors only open when you aren’t looking for them. She also said, If you drop a truth in water, it will sink. If you stitch it into a hem, it will hold.

I put my fist in my pocket and felt the button’s roundness against my knuckles. I wanted to throw it into the gutter. Instead, I gripped it tighter until the ache in my palm steadied me.

The past had refused to stay buried, and I didn’t get to choose whether I liked the timing. It came up in my hand like a coin I didn’t remember earning. It changed the price of everything after.